There’s no Influx: Canada sees drop in asylum seekers, many turned away sent to ICE 

Illustration: Chris Curtis

When President Donald Trump announced his plan for mass deportations of people in the United States, specifically those under the Temporary Protection Status (TPS), Canadians assumed that those under attack would flee north. 

At a campaign in British Columbia earlier this month, Liberal Leader Mark Carney said that the influx of migrants coming into Quebec from the U.S. is “unacceptable” and that the U.S. cannot be sending all their asylum seekers to Canada. 

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has blamed the Liberals for a “broken border policy” and is pushing for more surveillance and deterrence for a “secure border.” 

The anxiety of an oncoming migrant crisis in Canada has been looming in the air since November. But the reality is that there is no influx of refugees overall in Canada.

While there’s an increase in the amount of asylum claims at land ports in Quebec, going from 835 in March 2024 to 1,385 in March 2025, Quebec in general has seen an decrease in overall number of asylum claims in the province. 

Between January and March, the province saw 4,525 asylum claims between all ports of entry compared to 10,250 claims in the same period from the previous year. 

In an interview with Radio-Canada when Quebec Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge was asked about asylum seekers crossing at the Quebec border, he said, “We can’t take on all the world’s suffering alone. We have to do our part. Quebec and Canada always have done their part. Canada remains a welcoming country, but our capacity is not infinite.” 

Yet PRAIDA, a provincial government organization that houses refugees, had 448 new users in March while their bed capacity is 1,150. 

On a wider scale, Canada as a whole is seeing a 58 per cent decrease in asylum claims across the country. At the end of March this year there were  7,465 claims across all ports of entry compared to 17,985 in 2024. 

Support Local Journalism!

Abdulla Daoud, executive director at the Refugee Centre in Montreal, says that they are still busy as an organization to meet refugee needs, but they were even before the Trump administration came into power for a second term. They have not seen any increase in the number of refugees coming to their organization. The Welcome Collective In Montreal has even seen a significant decrease in the number of clients compared to the same months last year and two years ago.

If the Trump administration’s deportations are soaring, why don’t Canada’s numbers reflect that? 

For one, The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is now turning away more asylum seekers from entering Canada — the most in a decade. From January 1 to April 22, 2025, CBSA sent 1281 asylum claimants back to the United States, Rebecca Purdy, senior spokesperson of the CBSA told The Rover. 

The number of asylum seekers inadmissible to Canada more than doubled from 7,539 in 2021-2022 to 16,336 in 2023-2024. The CBSA is planning to “maintain current removal levels” this year and will increase the number of people turned back to the United States from 16,000 to 20,000 over the next two years.

“I don’t think people understand what it means to be turned away back to the United States,” says Daoud. “They simply think they’re just going back to the U.S., when in reality, they’re actually being turned away to ICE.”

***

The Canada U.S. Border Rights Clinic, an organization providing legal support for migrants at the Canada U.S. Border, told The Rover that before January 20, 2025, they rarely heard from people who got detained in the U.S. after being turned away at the border.

Now, they regularly hear from individuals and families in custody of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection or ICE. 

“Many are likely to be quickly removed from the U.S.—some to situations where they face imminent risk,” said a member of the Clinic, “The high risk of detention upon return from Canada raises the stakes for those seeking safety at the border.” 

The Clinic said that many migrants are unaware of the Safe Third Country Agreement or its consequences. For those that qualify for an exception, they often don’t know what documents to bring or have lost them. Once they are turned back at the border, they can never claim refugee status in Canada again and it’s an extremely difficult situation to remedy.

“We’re seeing heartbreaking cases of parents separated from their children—either across the border or in U.S. detention—with no clear path to reunification,” said the member. 

The conditions in ICE facilities are well documented, with instances of physical abuse, lack of medical care and the use of solitary confinement all being reported by migrant justice groups.The mere fact that they are detained for no other reason than being a refugee is a violation of international standards for refugee safety.

“The notion that the United States is a safe country for refugees has just never been borne out by the evidence,” says Alex Neve, international human rights lawyer. “We should not at all be countenancing having the United States as a ‘refugee protection partner’ for Canada at this time.”

In an April 14 report in The Globe and Mail, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed that it is now the organization’s policy to place asylum seekers and migrants redirected from Canada into custody and transfer them to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility for removal from the country.

“This is a really kind of new situation that we’re seeing with the Trump administration’s approach,” says Claisse “It’s hard to say how many of those people are going to be deported to their home countries, but I think there’s a very high chance that once you’re in immigration detention, you are facing deportation.”

Daoud says that, so far, the rhetoric around immigration in this election has been dehumanizing.

If elected, Carney promised to hire 1,000 more CBSA officers while Pollievre plans to add 2,000 more as well as install border surveillance towers and drone systems. He also wants to have Canadian Forces troops along the border and use military helicopters for surveillance. 

Canada significantly reduced immigration caps for permanent residents, international students, temporary workers, and asylum seekers last year, while the federal government also announced to spend $1.3 billion to bolster security at the border including $667 million for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, $355 million for the CBSA. 

“We’re going in the direction of how the U.S. deals with their border, which is investing heavily into surveillance, detention, and deportation — these things have bad outcomes,” says Daoud.

***

During the French-language debate on April 16, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was the only leader who argued that Canada should suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement given then violation of human rights for migrants in the United States.

Carney and Pollievre both stand by the Safe Third Country Agreement based on the reason that Canada cannot accept everyone. 

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said that Canada needs to welcome only as many immigrants and asylum seekers as they have capacity for and that Quebec is at capacity. 

The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and The United States recognizes that both countries are safe places for refugees, so someone who has a refugee claim from the U.S. would not be able to come to Canada and make a refugee claim here (there are exceptions for those who have family members already in Canada). 

The validity of this agreement has been assessed in the Supreme Court of Canada, and both times, Canadian judges initially found that the United States did not meet the standards to be safe for refugees. Yet, the decision was overturned on appeal over technical arguments in both cases. 

Daoud also explains that the profile of the person who we assume is fleeing the United States has shifted. 

When Roxham road was open, there were irregular entries because people were using the U.S. as a transit point to get to Canada. They might have been in the U.S. for less than a week. Now, the people with a TPS set to expire are people who have lived there for years, even decades. They built lives and communities in the United States. 

“Those individuals are way less likely to leave because they have connections and roots and identities in the United States,” says Daoul. “A lot of them are fighting for themselves to stay because that’s what they call home.” 

As TPS is expiring for many Haitans in the U.S., Melissa Claisse from the Welcome Collective says that her organization has seen a slight increase in Haitians with family exceptions to the Safe Third Country Agreement. Canada has a moratorium on deporting folks back to Haiti. 

For the folks that are making it across the border into Canada, they’re facing more precariousness. 

Claisse says that when the Safe Third Country Agreement was expanded, refugee support organizations like theirs were saying this will lead to more precarity for people seeking safety. That’s exactly what they’ve seen. 

The cases that the Welcome Collective is dealing with recently are far more complicated. As people don’t make a refugee claims at the border, they don’t have access to the same resources and could end up in immigration limbo for years. 

“We are able to help fewer people with the same number of resources because the complexity of each case is so much more,” she says.

Capacity and the so-called “cap” of it is a point that is brought up a lot recently in discussing refugees coming to Canada. Many leaders agreed that Canada just doesn’t have the capacity to take in more newcomers and refugees. 

“Do we hear that about our healthcare system? ‘Oh sorry, we’re at capacity, we can’t help anyone else’? No, that’s not how it works. We say: the healthcare system needs to be improved. We need to invest in it, and that’s how capacity works,” says Claisse. “Capacity is never a fixed number. It’s a choice.”

Daoud points out that Canada has invested a lot in deterrence and little in infrastructure which results in “capacity issues” for community organizations stretched thin and high costs for the government. 

For instance, when refugee claimants in Canada can’t get a work permit right away, can’t access social services, and are made to endure long wait times to get status, they have to depend on social assistance. Investing in streamlining these types of processes, Daoud says, would save the government a lot of money.

“I think we have a lot of breathlessness in Canada about having massive numbers of refugees come over that border and that we need some sort of exceptional response and the best thing to do, therefore, is to close down the border. I think we need to take a step back from that and think about things in a global context,” says Neve. 

At the end of 2024, Canada had a total of 190,039 refugee claims. In comparison, Lebanon saw over 700,000 refugees, Poland saw over 900,000 and Turkey saw over 3 million. 

“For years, we like to think that we’ve got this remarkable generosity of welcome here in Canada — we’ve really made that our brand. Bottom line is we have never remotely been tested as a nation to take a true measure of how generous and welcoming we truly are,” says Neve. 

“I think it’s sobering to see that once the numbers become a few 100 or perhaps a few 1000 that sense of welcome seems to disappear.”